Re: Ada and Mac (Was: New version of AppletMagic)

[kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen)]

In article <JSA.96Oct10134957@alexandria>, jsa@alexandria (Jon S Anthony) writes:

> And that's just fine.  What would seem like the more sensible road
> here would be to put together a Thomson style deal (where ObjectAda
> uses the AdaMagic frontend, but Thomson BE, IDE, etc).  This has
> produced one of the (maybe _the_) most impressive Ada offering to
> date.  Question is, who is the Thomson equivalent for the Mac in such
> a scenario???

I think that is an ideal scenario, but I believe it may be too early
for anyone to fill the implementor role.  Ada vendors are too busy with
their current projects to take a chance with an unfamiliar Macintosh
market.  Macintosh tool vendors are too busy with their current
projects to take a chance with an unfamiliar language (unfamiliar
to a lot of their customers as well).

This may be a case where GNAT will lead the way and eventually
another offering devoid of command lines, make files, etc. will
come onto the Macintosh market.

Or in another sense, Thomson may lead the way, creating a success
model in the Microsoft world which many (even Thomson) would seek
to emulate on Macintosh.

With increased interest, another component source might be
Motorola.  They have their own C/C++ compiler for PPC
and offer a version (sometimes in conjunction with Apple) for
Macintosh.  A Motorola employee was just commenting in comp.arch
today about improvements they might make in their peephole
optimizer in the back end.  They are close to the chip, and
50% of the time someone buys a PowerMac Motorola makes a sale.
They are also involved with their own Macintosh clones now,
so somehow I get the feeling they don't see compiler sales
as the product line to fund another string of PCS satellites.
At some point Motorola might be quite receptive to having
their back end used with Intermetrics front end in an PowerPC
compiler.  Of course no compiler integrator would go for this
if Intermetrics and Motorola each wanted more than 50% of the
proceeds :-).

Although Motorola is the exclusive manufacturer of 68K chips, I
don't know that they have any compiler back ends kicking around.

Larry Kilgallen